nd the appeal made in his
first really original paper in the "North American Review." All these
elements of aim and doctrine were directly and explicitly American, and
his most conspicuous poems, "Evangeline," "The Courtship of Miles
Standish," "Hiawatha," and "The Wayside Inn," were unequivocally
American also. In the group of poets to which he belonged, he was the
most travelled and the most cultivated, in the ordinary sense, while
Whittier was the least so; and yet they are, as we have seen, the two
who--in the English-speaking world, at least--hold their own best; the
line between them being drawn only where foreign languages are in
question, and there Longfellow has of course the advantage. In neither
case, it is to be observed, was this Americanism trivial, boastful, or
ignoble in its tone. It would be idle to say that this alone
constitutes, for an American, the basis of fame; for the high
imaginative powers of Poe, with his especial gift of melody, though
absolutely without national flavor, have achieved for him European fame,
at least in France, this being due, however, mainly to his prose rather
than to his poetry, and perhaps also the result, more largely than we
recognize, of the assiduous discipleship of a single Frenchman, just as
Carlyle's influence in America was due largely to Emerson. Be this as it
may, it is certain that the hold of both Longfellow and Whittier is a
thing absolutely due, first, to the elevated tone of their works, and
secondly, that they have made themselves the poets of the people. No one
can attend popular meetings in England without being struck with the
readiness with which quotations from these two poets are heard from the
lips of speakers, and this, while not affording the highest test of
poetic art, still yields the highest secondary test, and one on which
both these authors would doubtless have been willing to rest their final
appeal for remembrance.

In looking back over Longfellow's whole career, it is certain that the
early criticisms upon him, especially those of Margaret Fuller, had an
immediate and temporary justification, but found ultimate refutation.
The most commonplace man can be better comprehended at the end of his
career than he can be analyzed at its beginning; and of men possessed of
the poetic temperament, this is eminently true. We now know that at the
very time when "Hyperion" and the "Voices of the Night" seemed largely
European in their atmosphere, the aut